The Rackenfaction: The Inexplicable Andy Yingst

If you’ve been with us awhile, you know we love our instructions. Variety cryptics have instructions because each has unique rules that makes it not, pace our last puzzle, like a normal crossword. Our instinct is to use the instructions to spell out enough of those differences to facilitate solving, but not so many that we give the puzzle’s secrets away.

But that’s a fine line, and we’ve watched people solve our puzzles without instructions altogether so that our nudges wouldn’t tip our hand too quickly. When we say ”people,” we mean our editor Andy Yingst, whose nom de grille is juff and who sometimes streams cryptic solves on Twitch as @juffo__wup. Andy is a crafty and delightful constructor of cryptics — originally on their blog, then in places such as The Browser, Out of Left Field, AVCX and The Wall Street Journal, and now, in addition to all those places, their new publication The Gnomon.

Our puzzles are often logic-based, and we were inspired by watching Andy raise the level of abstraction one level higher — you may note that last week’s puzzle, as well as today’s puzzle, feature what one might call unhelpful instructions. The point, of course, is to make it more fun for the solver, or at least, to make the sun all the warmer for them when they emerge from the valley of the shadow of dearth.

We realize that we’re talking about our puzzles here in the forum where we’re suppose to be talking about Andy, but what we love about working with Andy is this simpatico relationship we have that challenges, nudges, pushes, refines, enlightens and, as previously mentioned, inspires. As much as anyone, Andy understands the big swings we want to be making with our puzzles and distinguishes between “too far” and “not far enough” in a way that we can’t always see. They’re from the same cloth in the best sense.

Important though too is that Andy has collab'd with dozens of folks — off the dome, let's see who we can come up with: Teamcrazymatt, Lila, Longyfan, Joeadultman, Jess Shulman, Frisco, Skaldkaparmal, ProbablyApocryphal … — and test solved dozens more. They're at the very center of the indie cryptics moment. Thanks, juff, for hanging with us and making these puzzles better.

If you haven't had the pleasure, let us recommend the following to those with Rackenfracking tastes: the kickoff puzzle for The Gnomon, Answers; their WSJ variety cryptic with Shulman, Loopholes; from the blog, how about their collaboration with Pixlate (d'oh! We forgot Pixlate!) Treatise on Trickery; and of their Browser work, where they're a bona fide contributor, I don't know how one even picks but I remember #142 being a pip.